Thirty Years – 1922-1952
The Story of the Communist Movement in Canada

CHAPTER FIVE: The Test of a Party

THE TEST OF A PARTY, as Lenin pointed out, is its attitude
towards its own mistakes. During and immediately after its
election the new leadership of the party fell considerably short
of a Leninist attitude in that respect. Faced with the task of
overcoming the theoretical weaknesses which had facilitated the
Trotskyite and Lovestoneite attacks upon party unity, the new
leadership concentrated an energetic ideological campaign
against those two anti-Leninist tendencies, but failed to recognize
the very serious weaknesses in its own theoretical work.

The new leadership was in error on the question of the status
of Canada and, therefore, of the perspectives of Canadian
development. The importance of this question may be illustrated
by the changes that had taken place since we had first issued
the slogan of "Canadian Independence." By 1929 the Canadian
bourgeoisie was exercising sovereign authority in all distinctly
Canadian affairs. With the merging of bank and industrial
capital, the rise to power of the finance-capitalist oligarchy and
the increasing participation of the Canadian monopolists in the
imperialist struggle for division and re-division of the world
market, Canada had become an imperialist state. The monopolists
maintained vestigial forms of colonial relationships to
Britain as barriers between their monopolistic privileges and
the advancing forces of the workers and farmers. But, while
preserving these obsolete forms of colonial subordination, the
Canadian monopolists were already looking towards a junior
partnership in United States imperialism for themselves. The
change in the status and the aims of the capitalist class had
not brought national sovereignty to the people of our country.
On the contrary, as events have shown, the Canadian monopolists
deliberately betrayed the century-old dream of Canadian
independence for their personal profit and class privileges. At
the same time, however, the change had rendered the slogans
of the struggle for Canadian independence from Britain obsolete.

Instead of recognizing the character of the change that had
taken place, the new party leadership put its demand for
independence from Britain at the centre of all its political work.
It dressed up the demand for "Canadian independence" in an
elaborate, almost fantastic argument that independence from
Britain was essential to avoid the danger of Canada becoming
the battleground in a threatening Anglo-American imperialist
war. The effect of this false theory was to make the
Communist Party an ideological ally of bourgeois nationalism which
developments had already made reactionary. The new path of
the proletarian struggle in Canada was determined by the
domination of monopoly-capitalism and the anti-national
imperialist aims of the finance-capitalist oligarchy. Events had
rendered obsolete the idea of national struggle for freedom
from British imperialism. The main enemy of the Canadian
workers was now Canadian imperialism. The most dire
immediate threats against the Canadian people now came from the
Canadian monopolists and their anti-Canadian aims. The
immediate and pressing need of the party was to concentrate every
ounce of its energy to prepare the workers for sharp struggles
which loomed ahead.

Thus, the leadership which had fought against the Trotskyite
and right liquidationist revisionism was itself leading the
party along a false path. Federalistic tendencies bad been
developed systematically by MacDonald and his supporters and
attempts to combat them were weakened by the errors of the
new leadership.

Again it was the youthful members of the party who challenged
the incorrect theories. Headed this time by Leslie
Morris, Sam Carr, John Weir and Oscar Ryan, they challenged
the "Canadian Independence" slogan and called for re-examination
of Canada's political perspective. The reply of the
party's political bureau was a lengthy and involved attempt
to prove the validity of the "Canadian Independence" slogan.
The attitude of the membership to that defence is illustrated
by the fact that it became known simply as "the 24-page document."
However, by dint of earnest, widespread and protracted
discussion and a sincere desire to achieve a correct Marxist
policy, the leadership did belatedly recognize the change that
had taken place in the status of Canada. In the spring of 1930
the Political Bureau repudiated the estimation of Canada as a
colony and withdrew its "Canadian Independence" slogan. Incidentally,
it should be added that the resolution announcing
that repudiation was simultaneously the first official document
of our party which specifically described the new character of
the Canadian state: an imperialist state, in which the fundamenal
line of class conflict is between the interests of the
working class allied with the democratic farmers and urban
middle-class people, and the anti-social predatory imperialist
ambitions of monopoly-capital.

Realization that persistence in our error had undermined
efforts to improve the theoretical work of our party, combined
with the repeated emphasis by Stalin during that period on the
fundamental importance of criticism and self-criticism within
parties, resulted in the opening up of a party discussion for
the clarification of the party's estimation of Canadian perspectives
and preparation for a national convention. For reasons
over which the party had no control the convention wasn't
held. Police repression had become increasingly violent after
the election of the Tory Bennett government in August, 1930.
By the technique of breaking up meetings, arresting literature
distributors, raiding party offices on the flimsiest of pretexts,
etc., similar in all respects to the methods by which the
Duplessis government uses its Padlock Law in Quebec today,
the governments, federal and provincial, had imposed conditions
of semi-legality upon our party. Eventually we were
compelled to, limit the national gathering to an extended conference
of the Central Committee with leading members
engaged in mass public activities in each province.

The plenum met in February, 1931, in Hamilton. It was
raided on the very first day. None of the delegates was arrested;
indeed, the policemen were very unsure of themselves because
of the evident illegality of their action, but it was impossible to
continue in that hall. The plenum was moved to another
building in Hamilton only to be asked by the caretaker not
to come back the second day because he "had received a warning
from the police." At that, the presidium of the plenum
decided that if it was to be held at all, it must be held
underground -- so measures were taken accordingly. Thus the 1931
plenum, which extended over four days and marked a very
important stage in the political development of the party, was
held in conditions of complete illegality.

The plenum was self-critical in the extreme. It recorded its
decision that the central mistake of the party leadership
"consists in the failure to recognize the imperialist interests of the
Canadian bourgeoisie and this has led to the false assumption
of a basic difference in regard to the path of the proletarian
revolution in Canada as compared with other imperialist
countries."(1) The plenum called upon the party membership to
engage in responsible criticism and self-criticism for the
improvement of the party and its work. Its detailed resolution on
trade union and economic struggles focussed the energy of the
party membership upon the task of organizing the unorganized
workers and fighting for progressive policies in the unions that
were under reactionary leadership. It adopted a comprehensive
program of immediate reforms, it called upon the membership
of the party to join in the work of organizing the National
Unemployed Workers' Association. It formulated the first fully
critical and comprehensive resolution adopted by our party up
to that time on its relationship to and program of action for
workers in agriculture and working farmers. Similarly it adopted
critical resolutions on the responsibility of the party to the
youth of Canada and the Young Communist League, to working
women and to working-class mass organizations. The latter
resolution marked a vital and fruitful turn in the relation of
the party to the mass organizations.

The plenum finalized the expulsion of MacDonald and
other leading Lovestoneites from the party.

The plenum emphasized the serious shortcomings in the
work of the party in French Canada. It emphasized correctly
the glaring economic inequalities suffered by the workers in
Quebec: "... 4,079 inexperienced women workers in the
clothing industry in the district of Montreal receive less than
$12 a week ... the wages of inexperienced tobacco workers in
the Province of Quebec average $6.94 per week.... In Quebec
where the greatest number of women are in industry, infant
mortality is higher than in any other province."

The Young Communist League in French Canada had
initiated splendid campaigns for the protection of the youth
and the organization of young workers. Strikes such as those
of the textile workers at Cowansville and elsewhere, led by the
Y.C.L., marked the beginning of the emergence of the textile
workers of Quebec from industrial peonage. But the party did
not yet draw the Leninist conclusion from the fact that the
people of French Canada are a nation in every sense of the
word and demand for them the full right of national self-determination.

That self-critical national conference of the party adjourned
with unanimous adoption of a declaration that, while the fight
for unity on the basis of Marxism-Leninism had yet to be
completed, the sharpening capitalist crisis and the incontestable
spirit of struggle permeating the working class was the guarantee
that through single-minded devotion to the cause of the
working class and frank self-criticism of its own work, the
Communist Party of Canada would make of itself a mass Bolshevik party.

(1)
Resolutions of the Enlarged Plenum of the Communist Party of Canada, February, 1931, p. 21.